If you have a child in a low-performing school, you had a choice to move him or her to another school, a better one. If there was none in you district, you could move your child to another district for school. All the transportation needs would be by your own resource, though, but it was an alternative to staying at the low-performing school. The other school would have to have the room to take another student but it was choice that wasnt' there before.
Now, the LAUSD Board seems to have found a way to get more dollars collected by changing that situation. "LAUSD to Deny Permits to Better Schools," SCHOOL SHOCKER By David Coffin. CityWatch, Vol 8 Issue 21, Pub: Mar 16, 2010.
http://citywatchla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3314
This situation is more able to be used when you are located near a edge of the school district's border. The adjacent district's conditions may be better and as things go lately, probably are. For example, Lincoln High's nearby districts would be Alhambra and possibly South Pasadena if you travel a little further. South Pas would likely not take anyone outside their district since they already check residency for people claiming to live there, so they would not be looking for new students. Alhambra may be happy not adding new students from outside the district, but the option is there, you just cannot force it.
This article is mainly about those Districts that do accept another district's students and LAUSD's actions to pull them back. Returning students to the situations that the students and parent's thought they had put behind them does not make for a happy or productive condition for anyone. The reason again is to get the dollars that go with the students.
I don't think that this is the way to approach the problem. If the school performance was improved, the students and parents might not choose to leave. But LAUSD is too big to change when it needs to adapt. When it does make changes, the changes that happen either are cosmetic, affecting little of any real substance, or, they are so dramatically different that the assurance of any improvement in performance is only theoretical and that ensures nothing for students who turn out to be the guinea pigs with any of the ill outcomes being at their expense.
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